The Seahawks are close to another Super Bowl — give John Schneider big props
This is a column about the 2025 Seattle Seahawks, or at least the man behind them.
It’s going to take a little bit of patience before I get there, though.
Because any time I think about Seattle’s general manager or the dress shirts he sweats through during a game, I invariably flash back to a very specific Monday morning in Detroit and the rental car I’d been asked to return.
It was the last weekend in October 2012, and I was in town to cover what turned out to be Seattle’s white-knuckle loss to the Lions. The Seahawks had allowed two touchdowns in the fourth quarter of that game, losing 28-24. Afterward, a member of the team’s traveling party asked if I would be willing to return a rental car so he could take the team charter home.
This was something that happened from time to time, and it saved my newspaper the price of a cab trip.
Except the following morning, when the valet brought the car around just before 5 a.m., I became worried.
This didn’t look like a rental car.
The floor in front of the SUV’s passenger seat was filled with empty energy-drink bottles, Jimmy John’s bags and a parking pass from Western Michigan football (Go Broncos!).
I asked the valet to double check, and he said that was the vehicle attached to my ticket. I looked in the glove box, and found the car was, in fact, registered to a rental-car company, so I shrugged and headed off to the airport.
It wasn’t until the lot attendant asked me, “Would you like a receipt, Mr. Schneider?” that I realized what happened. I was returning the car that John Schneider had driven on a Midwest scouting trip.
And yeah, I took the receipt, which showed the car had been rented eight days earlier at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and driven more than 1,200 miles.
That’s the part of a GM’s job we don’t see.
The legwork behind the draft picks and the trades. The rocks he turns over, hunting and pecking for a hidden gem, and then when this team of players he’s acquired takes the field on Sundays, the GM slides largely into the background, or at least a luxury box.
Schneider’s fingerprints are all over the past 16 years of Seahawks football. He’s the one who picked the players who came together to form one of the very best defenses in league history. He’s the one who believed in Russell Wilson enough to draft him in the third round as part of a draft class that is among the league’s best over the past 30 years.
But in some ways, Seattle’s organizational structure obscured Schneider’s influence. Pete Carroll had final say on football matters, and while they always referred to it as a partnership, the decision-making process remained something of a black box.
It’s different now.
Carroll is gone. That wasn’t Schneider’s decision. It was made by the owner, Jody Allen, but the result was that the Seahawks became Schneider’s team in a way that they weren’t before.
He’s the one who picked the new coach, Mike Macdonald.
He’s the one who decided to switch starting quarterbacks for the second time in three years, trading Geno Smith and replacing him with Sam Darnold.
Schneider is the one who traded receiver D.K. Metcalf.
And Schneider is the one who still has an eye for acquiring the talent necessary to forge a world-beating defense.
There had been some uncertainty about that last part.
Some thought that Schneider had lost his touch when it came to picking personnel or that he’d never had it to begin with. At least not when it came to drafting offensive linemen. Perhaps he and the Seahawks had simply gotten lucky when drafting guys like Kam Chancellor and Richard Sherman in the fifth round. Or maybe Schneider had just run his course in Seattle, plateauing much as Wilson and Carroll had.
This season has provided a thoroughly definitive answer to that last question.
Schneider isn’t the only reason the Seahawks are one win away from reaching the Super Bowl, but he is responsible for the decisions that made it possible. The fact that he’s gotten the franchise back to this point without ever really bottoming out makes it all the more impressive.
In his 16 seasons as general manager, the Seahawks have finished with a winning record 13 times. They’ve never won fewer than seven games. They’ve won at least one playoff game in eight of those 16 seasons.
Maybe this year, he’ll finally be named the league’s Executive of the Year, an award that is voted on by the Pro Football Writers of America.
Even that’s not going to fully capture the magnitude of what he’s done in Seattle though, which brings me back to the realization I had the morning I returned his rental car.
We really don’t know how far Schneider’s gone out of his way to put the Seahawks in this position, but every Seahawks fan should be thankful he’s the one at the wheel.
Danny O’Neil was born in Oregon, the son of a logger, but had the good sense to attend college in Washington. He’s covered Seattle sports for 20 years, writing for two newspapers, one glossy magazine and hosting a daily radio show for eight years on KIRO 710 AM. You can subscribe to his free newsletter and find his other work at dannyoneil.com.
This story was originally published January 20, 2026 at 11:30 AM.